which ones are collected about you, and which ones are closed from you?

The state has actively embarked on the formation of a register of citizens and filling it with heterogeneous data. A variety of officials speak about this after the main step – the introduction of a system of “electronic agendas”. We were preparing for this. Let me remind you what exactly has been done in the last two years to collect the maximum amount of data within state systems.

The state in December forced all commercial companies to give themselves the biometric data of 70 million able-bodied Russians (Law 211535 on the Unified Information System). Everything that banks, telecoms, Internet services have collected.
In January 2023 Putin instructed adopt a law “about depersonalization“(992331). Despite the name, the law will allow the state to forcibly take any other personal data to itself into a “single system.” Officially, officials spoke about this in plain text in order to develop services and develop AI. The law was scandalous and stalled in the fall, but in January, the President took him a momentum.
Law on clasiphides (141597). Forces HH, CIAN, Avito and others to install a special counter that collects data from each of your visits. The law allows the use of data for “other purposes” and – attention – “to develop systems for various purposes for government agencies (FZ 149). It also integrates their data into the “Gosuslugi”.
Law on the state tally (FZ 2124) forces 79 largest applications, services and websites to install a tracker that collects every fact of playing a video, the content of the page, its URL, the first 256 characters of the content.

I have been studying privacy for the last five years and I can say that together these laws are unique, there is no such set in any country.

Thus, the “registries” will store a profile in which everything will be about you, from appearance and data from cameras, to what article you read last week, what product you studied on Avito and what apartments you were interested in. And there is already stored data from the Federal Tax Service about each of your checks and its composition. It will be good to predict your behavior.

And use it to reward or punish, allow or restrict services with one click. All this is outside the traditional institutions. Such is the ideal world through the eyes of a technocrat.

Chronicles of closed data

But we are not only promptly creating new electronic registers of citizens and “advanced mobilization deployment systems.” They also promptly close data about the work of state systems. Here are some examples:

Closed open data portal data.gov.ru. For “reassembly”, but it is characteristic that no opening dates have been announced. The current site is not maintained and is closed, although what is the problem with leaving the old site available
The data of Rossotrudnichestvo, Rosmorechflot, Rosimushchestvo (24 data sets) are completely closed.
discontinued publication of crime statistics.
Most of the indicators from the Rosstat website and the EMISS system will disappear or stop being updated (for this accepted new law)
Hidden information about energy consumption
Hidden data on property owners
Even regional portals are closed. For example, the portal of the city of Perm (480 data sets) replaced on … a landing page with a telephone directory.
23% of the country’s budget for 2023 is classified. This share is three times greater than in the “belligerent USA”.
Stopped publishing declarations of officials

At least 14 departments in total hid all or part of the statistics. This is a purposeful trend that is difficult to explain by security. After all, deeper data is available to foreign intelligence services, official datasets are secondary for them.

It’s a pity, because open data is a job opportunity for independent analysts and data journalists who help the state and society develop. It is also the “fuel” for data-driven startups, including marketing ones. Now you should rely only on the data that you collect yourself.

What is the result? We see a system that builds a reinforced concrete wall around itself, and in doing so breaks through the last barriers to your online behavior. She does it successfully and systematically. What the system will build as a result will be unprecedented. This story is happening with us.